Health & Wellness

Our choppers are crowded, crooked and riddled with cavities. It hasn't always been this way

I sat at an oral surgeon's office waiting for my daughter. The scene called to mind an assembly line. Patients went in, one after another, resigned to having their third molars, commonly known as wisdom teeth, taken out. They left with bandages, specially form-fitted with ice packs, wrapped around their heads. Each carried a gift T-shirt, preprinted home care instructions, and prescriptions for antibiotics and pain meds.

Removal of the wisdom teeth is almost a rite of passage for young adults in America today. From my vantage point, however, there is something very wrong with this tradition. I am a dental anthropologist and evolutionary biologist and have spent 30 years studying the teeth of living and fossil humans and countless other species. Our dental issues are not normal.Most other vertebrate creatures do not have the same dental problems that we do. They rarely have crooked teeth or cavities. Our fossil forebears did not have impacted wisdom teeth, and few appear to have had gum disease.

Indeed, the teeth of modern-day humans are a profound contradiction. They are the hardest parts of our body yet are incredibly fragile. Although teeth endure for millions of years in the fossil record, ours cannot seem to last a lifetime in our mouths. Teeth gave our ancestors dominance over the organic world, yet today ours require special daily care to be maintained. The contradiction is new and is limited largely to industrial-age and contemporary populations. It is best explained by a mismatch between today's diets and those for which our teeth and jaws evolved. Paleontologists have long understood that our teeth are deeply rooted in evolutionary history. Now clinical researchers and dental practitioners are also starting to take notice.

A recent study by Chinese researchers found that as many as one in five COVID-19 patients experienced cardiac damage, heart failure — and, in some instances, death.

Out of 416 hospitalized patients, 19 percent showed signs of heart damage. About half of those with heart damage succumbed to the disease while only 4.5 percent of those without didn't.

A report by Italian physicians found similarly serious cardiac issues associated with the coronavirus outbreak. An "otherwise healthy 53-year-old patient" developed myocarditis, a serious inflammation in the heart, just a week after experiencing fever and a dry cough due to COVID-19.

In one instance, as The New York Times reports, a 64-year-old patient in Brooklyn was rushed in to be treated for a blocked artery. But as it turns out, it wasn't a heart attack — it was the coronavirus.

We already knew that COVID-19 patients' lungs were affected by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The focus has largely been on respiratory problems, with reports of a shortage of ventilators in the US making headlines for weeks now.

"We were thinking lungs, lungs, lungs — with us in a supportive role," John Rumsfeld, chief science and quality officer at the American College of Cardiology, told the Times. "Then all of a sudden we began to hear about potential direct impact on the heart."

Dr. Anthony Cardillo explains the treatment combination he is seeing great success with or severe COVID patients.

As vaccine talks continue to emerge as the only 'cure' to this pandemic, what's actually happening on the ground tells a different story. A Los Angeles doctor is reporting remarkable success in treating COVID-19 patients using a specific combination of zinc and hydroxychloroquine - the drug that is controversial regardless of it being inexpensive and readily available.

Dr. Anthony Cardillo, an ER specialist and the CEO of Mend Urgent Care, has been prescribing the zinc and hydroxychloroquine combination on patients experiencing severe symptoms associated with COVID-19. In an interview with KABC-TV, Cardillo stated:

"Every patient I've prescribed it to has been very, very ill and within 8 to 12 hours, they were basically symptom-free, [...] So, clinically I am seeing a resolution."

"We have to be cautious and mindful that we don't prescribe it for patients who have COVID who are well," he said. "It should be reserved for people who are really sick, in the hospital or at home very sick, who need that medication. Otherwise we're going to blow through our supply for patients that take it regularly for other disease processes."

Rob Elens, a Dutch GP, has successfully treated eight covid-19 patients with hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin and zinc orotate. His protocol consisted of hydroxychloroquine and zinc orotate for four days and azithromycin for three days. All eight patients, five men and three women whose age ranged between 60-80+ and who had various clinical symptoms, have been cured. One person experienced diarrhea, and one other a stomach ache, but other than that, there were no side effects from the treatment. After only four days of this treatment, all patients were asymptomatic, and thus cured.

"A number of doctors have conducted research on the effects of a combination of zinc, hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin in South Korea, France, and the US. Several doctors shared this on social media, which prompted me to delve into those studies, and it turns out that those doctors saw very few to none hospital admissions or intensive care admissions from patients getting this treatment. So I started discussing this with my pharmacist, and afterwards we created the protocol."

He explained that hydroxychloroquine is a medicine that's been around for a long time, originally created in 1955 to treat malaria. Having gained much experience working with anti-malarial medicine during work in Africa, Elens felt confident in prescribing it for his patients who were suffering from symptoms suspected of being related to covid-19. In the interview he called upon his colleagues to talk with their pharmacies and to prescribe the same highly effective protocol.

However, the Dutch Health and Youth Care Inspectorate - a governmental institution - has now prohibited him from prescribing this treatment to his patients, claiming there is no evidence of effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine and azitromycine. The Inspectorate has warned that he will be fined if he continues. Meanwhile, evidence that they falsely claim is absent, continues to increase with more cases of people being cured with this method.

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has lead to a great many measures being introduced that look a whole lot like a medical police state. People are confined to their homes, only allowed to leave for 'essential' purchases, all non-essential businesses have shutdown, surveillance measures have been introduced and a number of individual rights have been suspended.

While a significant number of people are just waiting for everything to "go back to normal," willingly obeying the lockdown orders with zeal and calling out and shaming those who don't, others citing precedent from events like 9/11 can see that there is no back-to-normal. This is the new normal. Once the coronavirus recedes, as it inevitably will, what incentive is there for governments to turn everything back to how it was, giving up the powers of control they so easily instituted?

Welcome to the medical police state, where your individual rights take a backseat to a non-issue virus no worse than the flu. Join us on this episode of Objective:Health where we hash it out.

Can a special diet help in certain cases of asthma? A new study at the University of Bonn at least points to this conclusion. According to the study, mice that were switched to a so-called ketogenic diet showed significantly reduced inflammation of the respiratory tract. The results are now published in the journal Immunity.

Asthma patients react even to low concentrations of some allergens with severe inflammation of the bronchi. This is also accompanied by increased mucus production, which makes breathing even more difficult. A central role here is played by cells of the innate immune system, which were only discovered a few years ago and are called Innate Lymphoid Cells (ILC). They perform an important protective function in the lungs by regenerating damaged mucous membranes. For this purpose they produce inflammatory messengers from the group of cytokines, which stimulate division of the mucosal cells and promote mucus production.

This mechanism is normally very useful: It allows the body to quickly repair damage caused by pathogens or harmful substances. The mucus then transports the pathogens out of the bronchial tubes and protects the respiratory tract against re-infection. "With asthma, however, the inflammatory reaction is much stronger and longer than normal," emphasizes Prof. Dr. Christoph Wilhelm from the Institute for Clinical Chemistry and Clinical Pharmacology, who is a member of the Cluster of Excellence ImmunoSensation at the University of Bonn. The consequences are extreme breathing difficulties, which can even be life-threatening.

I have heard this sentiment from fellow doctors across the United States and in many other countries. We are all asking: Where are all the patients with heart attacks and stroke? They are missing from our hospitals.

Yale New Haven Hospital, where I work, has almost 300 people stricken with Covid-19, and the numbers keep rising — and yet we are not yet at capacity because of a marked decline in our usual types of patients. In more normal times, we never have so many empty beds.

Comment: This doctor seems to be a little ignorant on the subject. Considering EMS crews won't take flatlining cardiac patients to hospital under new NYC coronavirus rules, is it any wonder he's seeing a drastic drop in cardiac patients? While fear of the coronavirus may be leading people to stay away from hospitals despite needing emergency care, it could actually be exacerbated by a number of measures put in place to keep people out of hospitals unless they have COVID-19. There's undoubtedly more to this story than people being afraid of hospitals.

The Federal Drug Administration is trying to come up with new ways to tackle the coronavirus pandemic. This week, the FDA made guideline changes to avoid a blood shortage. Now, it might have another possible treatment plan for COVID-19 patients.

Soon, a new kind of blood donor could be helping patients in the Ozarks.

"Once you've tested positive for COVID and then recovered you're plasma is going to have antibodies in it," said Anthony Roberts.

The initial results from a placebo-controlled trial of hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 indicate that patients hospitalized with mild illness recovered more quickly with addition of the drug than with placebo at the start of a standard treatment. The results also suggest that hydroxychloroquine might convey some protection against the illness worsening.

Zhan Zhang, MD, of Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University, Wuhan, China, and colleagues reported results from 62 patients randomized to receive either placebo or hydroxychloroquine 200mg twice daily for 5 days on admission in addition to standard treatment consisting of oxygen therapy, and unspecified regimens that could include antiviral and antibacterial agents, and immunoglobulin with or without corticosteroids.

"The data in this study revealed that after 5 days of hydroxychloroquine treatment, the symptoms of patients with COVID-19 were significantly relieved, manifesting as shorten(ing) in the recovery time for cough and fever," Zhang and colleagues reported.